Driver’s Education

by Grant Ginder (Simon & Schuster)

Ginder’s second novel, a palimpsest of fathers and sons, is a sensitively observed story about storytelling. When Alistair McPhee suffers a debilitating stroke, he asks his grandson, Finn, to drive his 1956 Chevy Bel Air, nicknamed Lucy after his late wife, from New York to California, where Alastair lives under the care of Finn’s father, Colin. “I’ve mailed you a map,” he explains. Finn’s mission, as well as that of the book, is to map the route of the older man’s memories. The book’s narration is shared by Alistair; Colin, a writer for whom blank white sheets no longer signify “wide-open highways”; and Finn, who works for a reality-TV show and specializes in “massaging the order in which certain events happen.” If the novel strains, at times, toward the sentimental, it does so in the service of lessons that bear repeating. ♦